Opening Up
(Interview with an
Enneagram Nine)
I'm collecting real-life
stories of the change process so others
can see what it's like
for each of the Enneagram styles as they go through increasing
self-awareness.
Stories
tell that in a different way than theory. I'll start by asking what does
the word "transformation" mean to you?
I would
interpret the word "transformation" to mean "change," but I'm
wondering change from what?
I'm
interested in how people see what they're doing in their lives
to develop themselves. I'll ask for examples of what you've gone
through that you feel has been transforming, then tell me what
triggered them, what you've done that got in your own way, what
helped you. And what's changed for you? Have you let go of
something or are you different in some way? And do you feel
you're on a path of some sort? So, when you think back over your
life, what are some key experiences that stand out for you as
significant in terms of change?
I'd have to
start with something I remember happening in the third grade
that started me on a course of being afraid to speak in front of
other people. My mother died when I was about 4½ and we moved
around. The three boys, my two brothers and myself -- me being
the oldest -- wound up in an orphanage. My Dad remarried in
1945, took us out a couple of weeks before school began in
August of 1945. I went into the second grade in this parochial
school and the Sister, who I'm pretty sure was a good Nun, asked
the new kids in class to stand up and tell a little bit about
themselves. And I stood up and could not open my mouth. I did
not want to tell anybody that I was in an orphanage. And I think
that experience probably has led me to freeze, I mean totally
freeze in front of people all my life.
You
were in the orphanage for about three years?
Yes. I went
in shortly after my fifth birthday. We were there for two months
and my Dad, who was a mailman, found a couple on his mail route
who were willing to take two of us. he youngest one was in the
Infant Home but they took in the two of us who were in the
orphanage. That lasted about six months. My Dad had a room at
the Friar's Club at the time and he came earlier than he
normally would to visit us, and found the woman chasing the man
around the kitchen table with a butcher knife! They were
probably both drinkers. I don't remember that, but I assume they
were. Dad as quick as he could got us back into the
orphanage. So we were there for three years and a few months. That's
the only story I remember my Dad telling me about them. I do
remember the house. I remember playing in their back yard with
my brother, cowboys and Indians, or whatever. I remember my Dad
coming down every evening and telling bedtime stories, putting
me to sleep…. well, he never did put me to sleep because I
could never let him go. Telling me stories about his war
experience. As I think about it now I cannot imagine a father
telling a little four or five-year-old war stories. They weren't
gory war stories, but one of his jobs was at Fort Breckenridge
during the flu epidemic during the first World War, and he was
temporarily detailed to ride home on the train with dead
soldiers!
Move
forward a little bit, think about in your adult life, and think
of any events that were really change events for you,
things you felt grief about or joy about or you had some kind of
intellectual insight, something that shifted your perspective
somewhat, that you feel really impacted your life and how you
operate?
All my life,
even though there are many things he's done I can't condone,
I've been very close to my father. I think the way he thinks, to
the extent that when I got out of the service I joined the Post
Office, actually followed in his footsteps. And on one of my
routes through Swifton Village, which was a relatively nice
place to live, there was a philosophy professor, and somehow I
got into thinking deep. Then I became eligible retroactively for
the G.I. Bill eleven years after I got out of high school. I'd
never given any serious thought about going to college, but I
found out that with the number of kids I had, by going to school
I could pay for the tuition and still have enough money left
over that I could quit the second job I'd taken to augment the
postal salary. So now, the big questions was "What am I going to
take?" I was thinking of history, psychology, education, and on
my route with the philosophy professor I asked him if he'd be
willing to tutor me one-on-one in a course on metaphysics,
getting credit through the university. He said he would and they
accepted it. That was one big change. I wanted to take other
courses with him but he cut me off because I was very
non-vocal. He had no idea where I was, what I was thinking. And
my grade was not an A. Anyway, he pushed me on: "You've got to
try your wings elsewhere, move on in academia." It was
surprising that he moved several years later to St. Louis
University, and when it came time for my oral finals, I walked
in cold, and there he was, the Chief, sitting in the middle
chair. So I interpret that as "Somehow, for some reason, he had
always been looking over my shoulder."
It's
common among Nines I've talked to that it seems good things
happen to us and we can't always explain why. You've heard of
the
Hero's Journey, and that person was certainly one of those
good mythological figures for you. Even though he kicked you
out. In a way that's probably what needed to happen.
Absolutely,
whether he was just tired of me, or he knew that it would be
helpful to me, though at the time it felt like he was tired of
me because I could not really open up and express my thoughts.
In fact, I'm still very lacking in words to create dialogue.
Have
there been other experiences along the theme of finding your
voice, anything that helped you, or you sought out?
I've learned
that I must talk to myself, through prayer or meditation. Mostly
I equate those two. I call meditation a prayer. And it's really
just talking to myself.
What's
that conversation about, sometimes?
It just goes
every which way, but I have a number of set things I go through
every morning. I no longer play the radio in the car or
truck. If I'm in truck I'm usually by myself. There are a
number of set things I go through, and it's very hard to
concentrate on them any more because my mind is just everywhere,
but it's something that I try to come back to. They're mine now,
but they come from someone else. here's the first line from
Book 18 of Homer's Odyssey, two different versions.
I
don't know Homer. Could you give me the gist of it?
O.K. I
remember somebody saying there aren't different translations,
just different interpretations. So one of the two translations I
have is: "The spirit of man upon this earth is as the father of
God in man brings upon him." The other translation or
interpretation says the same thing only a little bit
differently, and I like them both but I like the second
translation better: "God Almighty gives men their daily minds,
day by day."
Ah.
So in a way you're looking for, "O.K., God, what do you have in
store for me today?"
Yes. Right. With my opening cup of coffee in the morning, I have
to barricade myself from whatever else is going. Actually, on
the living room wall I have a copy of Rembrandt's Homer that was
destroyed in a fire. The title of it is "Homer Dictates to Two
Scribes." Some artist did a copy of the remaining picture, which
is simply Homer. Nobody really knows what he looks like, but
there it is.
There it
is. And obviously it means something for you, and you
tie it to the quote from the Odyssey. So you have this space,
you have this thing you look at, you have your coffee, and this
kind of creates a mood for you, or an aura, an atmosphere. And
then you talk to yourself?
Yes, I just
let my mind roam. When I try to stay on schedule with the
sayings I'm supposed to be repeating. One is a quote from Jung,
one is a poem from Rilke, one is the whole poem, "Incantation"
by Milosz. There's a quote from the bible, something David says
to Solomon. If I make it through those, and it's so hard to
concentrate anymore, but I don't worry about it, I just let my
mind go. And I figure somewhere along the line there's a day
when I'll finish them. In the car there's a set of three.
There's Longfellow's "Song of Life." Then there's my own
co-optation of Lincoln's Gettysburg address, which is about as
short a speech as you ever want to hear.
Would
you mind telling it to me?
It starts
out, "Forty thousand years ago, our Father brought forth on this
earth a new creation, conceived in evolution and dedicated to
the proposition that all men and women are created unique…"
Good,
thank you, so I understand a little bit about the content. And
could you just go back a second to the quote from Jung. Again,
I don't need the exact quote, I just need the flavor of what
it's about, and the same with Rilke.
Well, Rilke,
in the translation I have, is "Who…" It has to do with an
angel…
It has
to do with an angel, so what does that means for you? You're
invoking the presence of an angel?
What it gets
down to is that every angel is terrifying, that's the last
sentence.
You
know, somebody told me every time an angel appears in the bible,
it says, "Do not be afraid."
Wait a
minute, it's coming back to me now. "Who, if I cried out would
hear me, among the angel hierarchies? And even if one of them
pressed me suddenly against his heart I would be consumed in
that overwhelming existence, for beauty is nothing but the
beginning of terror, which we are just able to endure. And we
are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us. Every
angel is terrifying." It was given to me in a class by a
psychoanalyst, James Tichener. I took a class with him last year
on "Jazz, Poetry, and Psychoanalysis."
So,
tell me in your own words, you go through this practice in the
morning... and what would you describe as your goal, why you do
those things every morning?
To make them
mine. To internalize them. Actually, I'm stealing other peoples'
thoughts, but I believe they belong to everybody. So if you had
something I would want to steal I would have no compunction
about taking it and using it and saying, "Oh, this is mine
now!" You'd still get credit for it.
I'm
asking why you do it?
Why
I do it. I guess I'm trying to focus in. It took me seven or
eight years to go through evening college, and if somebody
asked, "O.K., you got a B.A. in Philosophy, what is your
philosophy of life?" I could not tell them!
Try it this
way: How would you be if you didn't do that in the
morning?
I would be
dead! It's something I've been led to, something I can
hang onto no matter what I'm doing. You could put me in a cell,
you could tie me to a tree, and I would still have that.
So it's a
kind of stabilizing, centering factor. And you mentioned prayer
and you mentioned a biblical quote. Would you say you're
religious?
Oh yes! I was
born and raised Catholic, and I'm still a practicing Catholic,
but I disagree with the way it's taught. I disagree with some
fundamental understandings. Similar to how I was with my father.
He ruined his second marriage with drink. I was the goody-goody
boy of the three of us. My Dad and my stepmother had one
daughter together, but I'm sure us three guys were hellions
toward my stepmother, and the feeling was probably mutual; she
was an ogre to us. I cannot imagine what was going through her
mind when we three tough guys came out of the orphanage and into
her lap -- well, her lap was never available to us. My little
brother was a terror. And Joe the one who was in the Infant Home
for a while just went along; he was kind of wishy-washy, he
could go either way. I was always the goody-goody guy, never
gave them any problem. But I can remember my father, after a
bottle of wine in the evening, would sit me down across the
dining room table and berate me. I guess in his drunken stupor
he thought he was trying to help me. But more than anything else
it made me self-conscious. That's part of the reason I became so
overly self-conscious. Years later, when I was able to resolve
it within myself, I came to the decision that he really wasn't
talking to me, he was talking to himself.
You
seem like a pretty gentle soul. You must have found somebody in
your life who gave you a lap to sit on.
The only
thing that I can imagine and this is purely imagination… I can
imagine I had the love and care of my mother, who I don't
remember, a year or so longer than my brothers did. So there was
some love and trust built up, I'm assuming. I don't have any
early mental picture of her. In fact, until recently I didn't
have any picture of her at all because my Dad in his grief was
advised to get rid of her pictures. The counselor probably told
him to put the pictures away, while he did away with them. I
finally got one from an aunt. You know after we were in the
orphanage, my Dad was in a little room by himself at the Friar's
Club and getting drunk every night. And he talked to the
Franciscan priest over at St. George, and told him every night
he was looking at these pictures of his wife and little babies
and then drinking himself into oblivion. And the priest says,
"Well, you've got to do away with those pictures."
You
stayed close to your father, anyway.
Oh, yeah. No
matter what he did, I loved the guy. And I guess what endeared
me to him were those bedtime stories. I'd say, "Just one more,
just one more," and he'd stay and tell another one, and then
another one. And for him I suppose they had to be true. He
couldn't come up with fairy tales.
So far
in what you've told me I've heard two themes in terms of what
you've been aware of and working on in your life. One has been
trying to find your voice, to be able to speak up more. And the
other is to stay centered, to have a focusing point every
morning. As you think about your own developing self-awareness,
is there any other theme you've worked on?
Well, I tend
to be out there in outer space. As aggravating as I make her, I
think I have to give credit to my wife for being so down to
earth and for creating a family and a home life that is just
tremendous.
So
there's a way in which your wife provides structure and focus
and stability. As you look back over these various kinds of
experiences where you've discovered your "Nine" qualities and
tried to work on them, or have looked for resources to give you
ideas of what direction to move in, in what ways have you
changed?
Years ago I
would not even have considered teaching a class. In fact,
with the Post Office I was a mail man for the first fourteen
years and I had a chance to go into supervision. I took it
because of the number of dependents I had--we needed the money.
I hated it, but I was so thankful it was at night, so I would
not have to face as many higher-ups as I would during the day. I
kind of slid into it and stayed there, even though I hated it,
stayed there the whole time. So that fear of talking to people
and explaining to people is changing.
The
fear was exaggerated when dealing with someone in authority?
Yes. So it's
been a long process even in these classes, speaking out. I had
tightened up to the point where I'm totally red-faced. I still
blush. I attribute part of that to being overly self-conscious,
whatever other biological reason there is. I know when I think
about it and try to force myself to turn red, I can't do it, but
put me in a situation where I feel inadequate or might come off
wrong or fall on my face, my face turns beet-red. And this has
always been an embarrassment to me, to the point where my voice
--if I'm able to get any sound out at all, any syllable-- is
cracking.
But
you have improved. Even though that's been a life-long problem,
it's changing for you.
Right, and I
think that's happening through the retirement courses I'm
teaching now, where there really is no pressure. Blurting
out something. I'm slow on the uptake because my mind seems to
take a complete, circuitous route around whatever is being
presented. When I do come up with a thought, more and more I'm
able to say it.
My
observation is that here you are this quiet guy, but there are
layers and layers and layers in your mind. When you write
things, poetry or whatever else you write, do you find that more
of who you are shows up?
Yes. Yes. I
wrote a couple of really short things in this Jazz & Poetry
class last year that are telling to me. Of course the
instructor's way of dealing with people is to let them find
themselves, give them the avenue to travel, let them go along
it, and all of a sudden the epiphany is there. So, yeah, more
and more I find that, when I sit down and struggle with
something to write. And besides words not coming easily to me
all through school, it was the same way in writing. I didn't
want to put anything down unless it was "the truth." Well,
what's "the truth?" I can remember in high school when I had to
do a paper, and I became so frustrated about what it was
I wanted to write that I just went to the World Book and copied
it word for word on that topic. I could not form a thought, a
complete sentence of my own.
You
mentioned earlier the word "epiphany." One of the things I'm
interested in as people think about change over their lives is
to what degree that's more or less evolutionary, and to what
degree there are moments, kind of thunder bolts or
epiphanies. So I'm curious to know how that's been for you.
Ahhh. Golly. Hmmm. I can't really pinpoint it. It's more like
it's an overall thing happening, where each little thing is
connected like a magnet to the next one. One of the things I
repeat to myself after the three things I say in the car is
something about "Every child is born to a world of phenomena."
In Peter Schaefer's play, Equis, near the opening of the second
act he tries to explain why one person thinks one way and
another person thinks another way. He starts out as a young
child and each moment is like a magnet, magnetized to the next
moment. Over time he can trace it back, but why it started to
begin with he doesn't know, he says, and neither does anyone
else.
